Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Programming Fun

I just ran across a great post on Ruby being designed to be fun.
I don't program in Ruby myself, yet. I've attempted to learn it several times. I get started working through Programming Ruby, but I never get very far. I never have much motivation to pick it up. It seems to occupy a niche that is happily occupied by Python in my programming ecosystem. If another language is going to displace Python, it will probably be some form of lisp. In the end, what finally makes me set aside Ruby are aesthetic reasons I'll talk about more later (when I finish the Writing and Coding series I'm working on).
Of course, I also looked at Python once or twice before it clicked for me, so maybe there is some Ruby in my future.
Still, I think that it is great that Ruby is designed for fun. When I did finally "get" Python, I had just come out of bad experiences with two other programming languages: I had hit Perl's 1000-line limit; then I switched to Java. Java's great, but it's not fun. Python made programming fun again.
That sounds like I had just gotten out of two bad relationships when I met her.
And maybe that's what it was.